We never even noticed the demise of the glossy magazine.  One day they were just gone, missing from waiting room tables everywhere as though they’d never been, with only empty racks and dusty outlines to mark their passing.

By and large they’re quite unmourned, it’s sad to say.  It’s tough to miss the sort of writing one only reads while killing time waiting for a haircut, articles you can put down unfinished without regret.

Blame COVID if you like. It’s our cell phones that finally did the deed.  Why be content with last week’s news or last month’s when tomorrow is there at our fingertips, ready to be awakened at the merest touch?  Of course we stopped buying print, and the internet is free, right?

We didn’t count on these mass language model pseudo-AIs, though, and it’s biting us where it hurts.  Not long ago, even clickbait had to be plausible, needed something real behind it, something solid to justify inflammatory headlines.  Today, though, there are no editors, no human pre-print readers to reject obvious fakes.  The only thing worse than magazines is the endless AI-generated pap that’s replaced them, and through which we all wade endlessly these days in an increasingly desperate quest for meaning.

Can we avoid being flooded out by all this automatic inanity?  How can we escape this deluge of dreck?  Or are we doomed to merely endure as the systems gradually, incrementally, improve, never really knowing again what’s real and what’s mere mechanical confabulation?

Believe it or not, magazines.

The best we could hope for from this artificial order would be raw fact, unadorned, disconnected from any other aspect of reality.  More likely we’ll continue to be drowned in high-volume low-grade fakery, with sensationalism smothering sense every time.  Much as Elon may tout his rebranded Twitter as the new media, raw unfiltered content can never replace well-crafted narratives with editorial oversight.

You don’t get those without paying for them.  Intelligent reporting is hard work requiring a professional mind, and editing is an art all its own.

It’s time to start paying for your news again, friends.

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